A continuous change of physical and mechanical characteristics and operational properties of functional and structural materials demands a corresponding adjustment of the cutting tool material for machining. The adjustment involves the development of a new tool material and sometimes a new design tool. These two directions of the improvement of metal-cutting tools have a lot of solutions. A look through these options by trial and error is expensive and laborious. Of course, that there are accepted trends in the choice of a rational variant, but they are not justified scientifically and are associated with the experience of the developer. In this situation, it is desirable to simulate the processing of the workpiece with a tool to identify the most preferred solutions for the design and material of the tool. The possibility of using the ANSYS software environment (standard module Workbench Explicit Dynamics) for such a choice of the preferred variants of the design and material of the tool is considered.